Tangent: please don't downvote someone asking questions, people. I for one had not considered that electric motors have no gears to shift, and wondered "surely both cars are automatic? Does Tesla have a patent on a faster automatic transmission or something?" so I appreciated someone asked.

Teslas don't need gears since they use electric motors. So there is literally no time spent shifting gears.

See https://www.quora.com/Why-don%E2%80%99t-Tesla-cars-need-a-ge...

The original Veyron could change gears in 8ms, and will, IIRC hit 60 in 2nd. Changing gear isn't going to be a considerable part of the time here.

Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugatti_Veyron states that the original Veyron gearbox could change gears in 150ms, so it is a considerable part of the time.

While the gear are shifting the engine RPM must go down then up; the 8ms figure certainly doesn't account for the complete sequence.

The Veyron does 70 in first gear. I don't know if its 0-60 times require a gear change or not.

The basic idea is that it is wasting time. But this is no longer a factor as the gear change is instantaneous with Automatic GearBox.

Electric cars do not have a gearbox and just have one rotor. This does place them in a disadvantage when starting though as there acceleration is affected. Formula E cars, have started using a 3 gearbox for their cars in order to have a faster start.

So it is possible that the Roadster does have a gearbox.

Tesla tried a gearbox in the first Roadsters, and it didn't go so well.